Verbs & Conjugation

Verbs express actions, states, and processes, and they are often the most grammatically complex part of any language. When designing your conlang's verb system, you need to consider several dimensions: tense (when the action takes place), aspect (how the action unfolds over time), mood (the speaker's attitude toward the action), and voice (the relationship between the verb and its participants). You do not need to mark all of these on every verb -- many languages only grammaticalize one or two of these categories. Mandarin Chinese, for instance, does not mark tense on verbs at all, relying on context and time adverbs instead. Decide which categories are important for your language and how they are expressed.

Tense locates an event in time relative to the moment of speaking: past, present, and future are the most common, but some languages make finer distinctions like remote past, recent past, immediate future, and remote future. Aspect describes the internal structure of an event: perfective aspect views the event as a completed whole ('I ate'), imperfective views it as ongoing or habitual ('I was eating' or 'I used to eat'), and progressive specifically marks an action in progress right now. Mood expresses the speaker's attitude: indicative mood states facts, subjunctive expresses wishes or hypotheticals, imperative gives commands, conditional describes situations dependent on a condition, and optative expresses hopes or desires. Some languages also have evidential markers that indicate how the speaker knows the information -- whether they witnessed it directly, heard about it from someone else, or inferred it from evidence.

A key design decision is how regular your verb system will be. In natural languages, the most common verbs are often the most irregular because they are used so frequently that their forms resist being regularized through analogy. English 'be' (am, is, are, was, were, been) and 'go' (go, went, gone) are prime examples. You can choose to make your conlang entirely regular, which makes it easier to learn and use. Esperanto took this approach -- every verb follows the same conjugation pattern without exception. Alternatively, you can introduce some irregularity for realism or to make the language feel more like a natural language that has undergone centuries of change. A good middle ground is to have regular conjugation rules with a small class of common verbs that have suppletive (completely different) forms or minor stem changes.